This Year's Model

A month or so ago, Amanda Palmer wrote a post on her blog, seeking to crowdsource "professional-ish horns and strings for EVERY CITY to hop up on stage with us for a couple of tunes" for several forthcoming tour dates in the U.S. and Europe. In lieu of payment for playing, Palmer noted: "we will feed you beer, hug/high-five you up and down (pick your poison), give you merch, and thank you mightily for adding to the big noise we are planning to make." For Palmer, who cut her teeth as a Boston street performer and pitched her earlier band the Dresden Dolls as "Brechtian Punk Cabaret," such an offer likely felt adequate and appropriate, given her fondness for sepia-toned models of performance and promotion. Traveling musicians have recruited locals to play with them since the days of big bands, and artists have always played for the joy of doing so in front of an audience, not just to collect a check (though that's certainly nice). Once word of Palmer's gambit started making its way outside her networks of fans and collaborators, however, the backlash was loud. For many such interested parties, Palmer's blend of century-old musical inspiration and 21st-century DIY entrepreneurship did not make sense (she eventually relented and found a way to pay the pick-up bands).

Over the past few years, Palmer has become something of a cause célèbre amongst tech-savvy music fans, messageboard denizens, and Maker Faire folks, with her web-based promotional efforts garnering raves from the likes of Reddit, Boingboing, NPR, and the well-trafficked music business blog Hypebot. It started in 2009, when Palmer raised $19,000 in 10 hours by selling t-shirts and holding an ad-hoc auction on Twitter. "TOTAL MADE THIS MONTH USING TWITTER = $19,000. TOTAL MADE FROM 30,000 RECORD SALES = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING," she wrote in a letter to loquacious wonk Bob Lefsetz that quickly made its way around music industry blogs. In a climate when fans are eager to situate greedy record labels against the power of the crowd, Palmer caught fire.

Three years later, after a marriage to novelist Neil Gaiman expanded her profile even further, she took to Kickstarter to fund a new record, book, and tour. In 30 days, she became the first musician to raise $1 million dollars using the service. Technically speaking, Palmer had become a Web 2.0 millionaire-- and like so many of the online nouveau riche, she had a head start. The second Dresden Dolls album debuted at No. 42 on Billboard, and Palmer's 2008 solo debut was successful as well (and co-produced by fellow new-media music mogul Ben Folds). Like a small-scale Radiohead, or (ex-Dresden Dolls tourmate) Trent Reznor, Palmer raised so much so soon by trading on a public profile built on the old model.

"[T]he concepts of independence and DIY are different beasts entirely when access is instant, audiences are global, corporations have gone guerrilla, and new recordings are forced to compete with freely circulated digital copies of themselves."

Many of her own fans and other interested onlookers blanched at the idea that a person who raised seven figures for a new album couldn't see fit to pay those recruited to play the it live. (Palmer actually explained where the million dollars went in another blogpost-- the design, manufacture, and shipping of an intricately packaged music commodity.) A week ago, a Palmer fan and member of the populist chamber music collective Classical Revolution published a well-reasoned letter in which she claimed that Palmer was "coming across as the 1% looking to exploit us." Palmer posted a lengthy response to this note in several parts. She opened by citing her street-performing, hat-passing resume as her authenticity, before boiling down her argument to one of classic relativism: "i would never criticize or judge you for drawing your own lines and deciding how to value your talent and time…. in exchange, i'd ask that you not criticize us because we belong to a different culture, where we're playing a different game, with different rules."

Over the past decade, we've seen the emergence of countless sets of rules about how to produce, promote, sell, and perform music, many of which are powered by stark ideologies of independence. It wasn't much of a surprise that someone like Steve Albini-- whose own simple "rules" are well-documented and defended-- would make his opinion known. In a thread on his Electrical Audio messageboard, Albini framed Palmer's actions as a breach of etiquette-- "an idiot who doesn't know how to conduct herself"-- and as a capitulation of "self-sufficiency and independence," by allowing her audience to dictate her artistic choices.

Of course, this is 2012, and one artist calling another an "idiot" on a messageboard is news. Albini later pulled back the "idiot" comment as "rude and sloppy" and praised Kickstarter, but without backing off his essential point: For an artist who has just raised over a million dollars from her fans, "it is just plain rude to ask for further indulgences from your audience, like playing in your backing band for free." He specifically went after Palmer's form of money management in the production stage: "most everything in it was absurdly inefficient, including paying people to take care of spending the money itself, which seems like a crazy moebius strip of waste."

Albini's own idea of DIY draws from those that started proliferating around the late 1970s in the UK, and flowered during the 1980s in the U.S. The Buzzcocks and Rough Trade, Minor Threat and Dischord, and Albini's band Big Black and Touch and Go, among many others, started turning musical independence into populist polemics, creating their own networks of production, promotion, distribution, and performance. They sought an alternative to the waste of corporate connections, where a band is forced to capitulate its art to an ostensibly larger audience who probably doesn't care anyway. Though bands have managed to translate this ideology to the 21st century, the concepts of independence and DIY are different beasts entirely when access is instant, audiences are global, corporations have gone guerrilla, and new recordings are forced to compete with freely circulated digital copies of themselves.

The promotional affordances of the interactive web, and especially the culture created around and through them, highlight the core difference between Albini's and Palmer's perspectives on DIY musicianship. For Albini, it's fairly simple: Artists maintain a strong sense of creative autonomy, particularly when positioned against the hollowness of promotional culture.

Here is where Palmer departs: Her sense of DIY is much more rooted in the self-promotional celebrity paradigm-- if not the get-rich-quick gimmicks-- of the Web 2.0 world. Palmer's 2009 Twitter auction was so successful because it relied upon her celebrity status-- she raised $19,000 in 10 hours by selling Amanda Palmer-branded merchandise. By subsequently publicizing the auction's success, she only reaffirmed herself as an unparalleled brand manager. That blog post was titled "How an Indie Musician can Make $19,000 in 10 hours Using Twitter," but the reality is that only a privileged few are able to command her sort of fan loyalty. Web 2.0 has changed a lot of things, but its democratic potential is very easy to overstate. In this way, Palmer and Albini represent the complicated but vast difference between using new technologies and alliances to gain artistic self-sufficiency, and doing so to reaffirm and enlarge one's existing popularity.

"At a time when the basic idea of musical value is in a state of flux, and traditional musical objects continue to recede into the cloud, these sorts of experimentation become the rule, not the exception."

Palmer's focus on maintaining the value of Amanda Palmer™ helps explain the "hi haters!"-styled response she crafted to the "trolls" who attacked her in the wake of the crowdsourcing experiment (love him or hate him, Albini never complains about being trolled). After playing a gig for National Public Radio-- which has its own experience in creative forms of fundraising-- Palmer wrote a blog post about it, in which she positioned herself as the latest victim in the ongoing battles over musical value in the digital age. Styling herself as a put-upon provocateur, Palmer dramatically claimed that "my band has hit a DEEP, PAINFUL cultural nerve... and i am a really convenient target at the moment."

She also revealed meeting a kindred spirit in the 2012 Free Music Wars: NPR intern Emily White, whose own blog post, titled "I Never Owned Any Music to Begin With", triggered a generationally defined backlash of its own, accelerated by a particularly sanctimonious and paternalistic response from ex-Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery. It makes perfect sense the two would hit it off: While White clumsily attempted to defend her acquisition of free music, Palmer was sticking up for the right to hire free musicians, echoing the lofty, if far from sustainable ideals of Wired editor Chris Anderson. Even when caving to demand and agreeing to pay her freelance employees a few days later, Palmer still managed to position herself as a martyr, claiming that she was "tied to the stake" for her cause. By claiming "this is how we be the media," she also squeezed in a reference to likeminded new media evangelists Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis, both of whom have been critiqued for espousing the transformative powers of the web while ignoring larger dynamics of class and power that easily sneak into these new networks.

To be sure, Amanda Palmer is very good at her job-- one in which her style of self-promotion is as important (if not more important) than the music itself. This makes her one of the most visible examples of artist/entrepreneurs testing similar ideas-- lending fans a sense of agency in creative decisions, and expanding the idea of what counts as a musical commodity. At a time when the basic idea of musical value is in a state of flux, and traditional musical objects continue to recede into the cloud, these sorts of experiments become the rule, not the exception. On one level, Palmer's million-dollar project shows that "deluxe" album packages are more popular than ever, appealing to fans who want more than a piece of plastic and cardboard to replace the easily obtainable .zip file and .jpg.

It's easy to position Palmer as the living embodiment of a successful 21st-century DIY musician, and many have. But such a designation leaves out the most important details. Amanda Palmer is a successful 21st-century musician/public figure/entrepreneur, each title feeding equally into her self-created brand. She has effectively translated the ideas that drove her as a street performer and cabaret act (no distinctions between audience and performer), and her more traditional, label-supported early-2000s work, into a new paradigm, much like Kickstarter has put the idea of community funded DIY projects on steroids. This makes Palmer an interesting subject for discussions of music and technology, but far from a workable model for up-and-coming artists. Appropriately, she ended her "trolls" blog post with a request that would seem self-evident for most musicians: "Do me a favor... keep talking about the music." If the music were the most noteworthy thing about Palmer's career to this point, that plea would be self-evident.